C&A goes native

By Hillary Davis

Since September, international clothes chain C&A has been displaying three Polish brands in its shops. There is hosiery from Ferax from Zduńska Wola, knitwear from a small Wrocław firm called Thora, and a collection of women's clothes by Fer S.A. based in Buk near Poznań.

"The hosiery we have at C&A are youth brands Gatta and Noggi by Gatta, which are directed at girls and young women aged between 15 and 25," says Katarzyna Zycinska-Jarosz at Ferax, a company which, under the brand names of its Swiss partner IRIL, exports tights to Spain, Ireland, France, Switzerland and the UK, and sells own-brand tights in international chains Marks and Spencer's and Boots. Under its own brand Gatta, Ferax also exports to most of Central and much of Eastern Europe, as well as Greece. Only about 30 percent of its hosiery is sold on the domestic market.

Fer S.A., which designs and distributes exclusive women's clothing, is 46 percent owned by German capital. The company, which began by sewing service clothes on the German market, began designing clothes aimed at Polish consumers in 1996. Nowadays, the firm, whose yearly turnover is about zł.30 million, exports its two brands, 'Fer' and 'Even', to Slovakia, Russia and the Czech Republic.

C&A will be selling 'Even', one of the company's two brands, since its other label, the more classic 'Fer Collection' doesn't tie in with C&A's Polish image.

"'Even' is directed at young, working women. They are clothes that you wear either at home or in the office; and because we use only high quality materials, the clothes are of a very high standard and certainly not cheap," Ewa Chorazewicz explains.

So while in Hungary, for example, C&A aims at older women and has vast shops (up to 40,000 square meters), and in Germany and Holland target women - as Swiatłowski puts it - "basically, from birth until death," in Poland they are concentrating on smaller shops, directed at the modern, sophisticated - and moneyed - young. "Oh, and children of course," adds Swiatlowski, "on the young family," that is, young working women's little children.

Both Swiatlowski and Chorewicz are keen to stress that cooperation at present is at an experimental stage. But Swiatlowski doesn't rule out the possibility that, if all goes well, the Polish brands might appear in C&A shops outside Poland too.

At present, C&A has three shops in the country: in Wrocław, Poznań and Warsaw (Wola Park), and plans to open another Warsaw shop at the Arcadia Centre next year. Negotiations on expansion into Poland's other major cities are also underway, while Swiatłowski confirms that C&A, which has already entered the Hungarian and Czech as well the Polish market, is, like many other international chains in Poland, also looking further east and south.

"H&M is not really threatening competition in Poland," says Swiatłowski, "Because we already compete with them all over Europe; here is no different. There's more competition from domestic rivals like 'Reserved'."

LPP S.A., which owns the brand 'Reserved', is currently developing 40 new shops to appear in big shopping centers all over the country by 2005 and aims to target teenagers between 14 and 20. It already has 68 shops under the brand name 'Reserved', including 15 abroad, which it hopes to top up to 20 by the end of this year.

'Fer' itself, which decided to postpone plans to float 3.15 million shares on the WSE in 2001, as a consequence of generally depressed share values, also hopes to go public in the near future: "I can't say when we'll make the decision; maybe in 2005," says 'Fer's' representative, Ewa Chorazewicz. But when the right time comes, 'Fer' hopes to fund the creation of its own national chain of company shops, by issuing shares on the WSE.